Corrugated or paperboard boxes or cartons are utilized to store and ship a wide variety of items. The types and sizes of corrugated or paperboard boxes vary widely in order to accommodate the types of items that are to be contained within the box.
In the formation of corrugated or paperboard boxes, a sheet of material, such as cardboard or corrugated board, is cut, scored and folded to form a collapsed box or container blank that can be erected, such as by a packaging machine or by an end user, to form the box having the desired shape. During the scoring and folding process for the box blank, a number of score lines are formed in various sections of the sheet in order to allow the portions of the sheet on opposite sides of the score line to be folded with respect to one another. When the sheet is completely formed into the collapsed box or container blank, parts of the sheet are secured to one another, such as by a suitable adhesive or by fasteners such as staples, such that the collapsed box or container blank can be quickly erected for use in containing the desired item or items within the interior of the box or container. In forming the sheet into the blank, certain areas of the sheet are folded so that the edge areas of the sheet are positioned in overlapping relationship to enable the edge areas to be secured together. With regard to the folded sections or edges of the blanks, it is desirable to maintain folded edges of uniform size in each respective blank, such that when the blanks are fit into a machine which erects the blank to package items therein, the dimensions of the folded blanks are the same.
However, due to the conventional methods utilized to form the folded edges in corrugated or paperboard blanks, the folded and scored areas of the individual blanks are often formed to have shapes, thicknesses, or other dimensions that are different from one another. The differences in the folded areas and/or edges of the blanks causes inconsistencies in or problems with the operation of the erecting machine into which the blanks are fed, because the variations in the folded edges of the blanks result in improper feeding of the box blank into the machine and/or damage to the box blank.
As a result, it is desirable to develop a machine and method which can operate to engage a folded edge formed in a blank to make the folded edge more consistent and uniform across a number of box blanks passed through the machine. It is also desirable to develop such a machine and method which can be easily integrated into a box blank forming machine as is known in the art.